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Virginia Supreme Court- Now Spam is Protected Speech

We have a few morons on the bench here in Virginia. Our Supreme Court Justices are trying to give rights to criminals that do not exist anywhere else in the country. In a stunning reversal of their own prior opinion, they have now ruled that anyone can send any type of spam they want to my computer, even if it contains malware, trojans and child pornography, because I am a Virginia resident and its the spammer’s constitutional right to free speech to do so.

The Virginia Supreme Court today struck down a state anti-spam law, saying the statute violated the First Amendment right to free and anonymous speech. The decision also tossed out the conviction of a North Carolina man once described as one of the most prolific spammers.

The ruling, arising from the Loudoun County criminal prosecution of Jeremy Jaynes of Raleigh, N.C., was also remarkable because the Supreme Court reversed itself: Just six months ago, the same court upheld the anti-spam law by a 4-3 margin. But Jaynes’s attorneys asked the court to reconsider, typically a long shot in appellate law, and the court not only reconsidered but changed its mind.

Jaynes was convicted in 2004 of sending tens of thousands of e-mails through America Online servers in Loudoun. He was the first person tried under the law, enacted in 2003, and Loudoun Circuit Court Judge Thomas D. Horne sentenced him to nine years in prison.

Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell said he intends to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Today, the Supreme Court of Virginia has erroneously ruled that one has a right to deceptively enter somebody else’s private property for purposes of distributing his unsolicited fraudulent emails. I respectfully but fervently disagree,” McDonnell said in a written statement. “We will take this issue directly to the Supreme Court of the United States. The right of citizens to be free from unwanted fraudulent emails is one that I believe must be made secure.”

It doesn’t matter what anyone wants to say in an email. If you send it to a list of email addresses as spam, you are abusing computer access rights, which ought to be illegal. Its illegal in most other states, but not Virginia.